can I use current() function in XPath, outside of XSLT?

Question

This is my XML document:

<root>
  <bad>
    <id>13</id>
    <id>27</id>
  </bad>
  <books>
    <book id='5'/>
    <book id='7'/>
    <book id='13'/>
  </books>
</root>

Now I'm trying to select all books that are not "bad":

/root/books/book[not(/root/bad/id[.=@current()/@id])]

This doesn't work. I'm getting all books, while book no.13 should be excluded. It's not XSLT. It's just an XPath request (I'm with Java). What's wrong?

Answer 1

The current() function is only supported by XSLT. But there's no need to use current() here. You can get the result you want with the following expression:

/root/books/book[not(@id=/root/bad/id)]